I’m traveling on business to San Francisco this week, quite fortuitously avoiding the East Coast blizzard of 2015.
It’s been several years since I’d last been here, so I took a walk to clear my head and get a little bit of fresh air. It’s struck me how a city can look so different each time you visit, whether it’s a place you’ve known for years or have only visited a couple of times. The paths and edges you remember may have been completely transformed, or is it one’s perspective that has changed? In any event, it reminded me of one of my first undergraduate reading assignments, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City.
What does this have to do with gardening, you might ask? Our built environment is an interconnected whole — indoors and outdoors blur, intentionally or not. Urban, suburban or rural, the landscape is just one element of the fabric of our environment. We move through these spaces and interact in them, and with them. How many other elements can you spot?